Health Policy and the Conservatives

Abstract

The above may strike some observers as a reasonable description of the National Health Service (NHS) after twelve years of ‘Thatcherism’ and a longer period of Conservative government. In fact, it is a description of the NHS hospital services in the 1950s — another lengthy period of Conservative government, but not one so associated with radical rhetoric and policy agendas about the ‘welfare state’ (see Eckstein, 1958, pp. 259–60, and Kendall and Moon, 1990, pp. 103–4).

We are in a situation where the management of key health care resources is in the hands of a network of relatively small, seemingly autonomous and undemocratic management units; there is little semblance of national and regional planning and where health services are ‘subject... to miserly penny pinching’; at times cost containment seems to be the only priority.